Re: Lark - A surface syntax for Common Lisp

I am a longtime ago Forth expert (from Telescope Observatory use). Writing Assemblers for various CPU’s in Forth is an afternoon’s exercise. That used to amaze other people who worked arduously for a year to obtain their Assemblers.

A big part of the reason for this simplicity is the near total lack of syntax rules, and the use of “defining words” to impart more semantics than previously existed. This pushes in the exact opposite direction from noisy syntax languages.

code Next
	ip )+ wp mov
	wp )+ jmp

Lisp s-exprs have just barely more syntax than Forth, and that alone makes Lisp less suitable for writing Assemblers like we did in Forth. In the above example, that “)+” is a Forth word that invokes a “;:” defining word to modify the top of stack item with an address mode. I cannot write something as simple using Lisp s-exprs.




> On Feb 15, 2026, at 08:14, Greg Menke (as gregm32768 at comcast dot net) <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> 
> I used a similar method writing a 8052 embedded cpu assember- a small language built on top of lisp so all the macros etc can be applied, and the effect of "running" it is to emit a located binary ready to run on the cpu.   Not used for realsies alas but disassembly of the object code shows it working.. the 8052 being sufficiently simple that its easy to work that out.   The theory was complex functions more advanced than simple macro assembly could be built up conveniently using lisp, perhaps not unlike Forth.
> 
> It was fairly simple to write, but did need a bit of nuance to get things to work right eg macros etc.
> 
> Greg
> 
> 
> On 2/15/2026 8:16 AM, Yuri Davidovsky (as work at disclosure dot ie) wrote:
>>> On 15 Feb 2026, at 11:03, Gerry Weaver <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> 
>>> It was actually inspired by several languages. Lark isn't a standalone
>>> language that happens to compile to Lisp — it's a skin over Common Lisp.
>>> Every Lark construct maps directly to a CL form. fn is defun, struct is
>>> defstruct, |x| x * 2 is (lambda (x) (* x 2)), @(...) drops straight into
>>> s-expressions. You can call any CL function, use CFFI, define CLOS
>>> methods with typed dispatch, write macros with backquote templates. The
>>> FFI, the package system, the condition system, the type declarations —
>>> it's all CL exposed through a friendly syntax.
>> It appears that you picked up where John McCarthy left off.
>> 
>> An interesting approach of making lisp a language that is more suitable for one personally, that is something that I would totally approve as I myself constantly invent ways of doing things differently and more conveniently. I have also been thinking recently about streamlined ways of parsing DSL languages in Lisp (essentially what you are doing here), and I think I haven’t come to a good conclusion how it should work.
>> 
>> Tokenising appears to be easy enough to do using the standard Lisp reader, however I haven’t decided on a good way to do parsing/syntax checking of the resulting list of tokens. How do you go about parsing the tokens in order to extract the syntax patterns (say for an fn definition) and compile them into lisp? Have you used the parsergen package in Lispworks for that, or did you come up with your own parsing tool?
>> 
>> I am not deeply familiar with the topic of computer languages’ parsing and would be interested to hear the perspective of someone who did some work in the area, as you evidently have.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
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